3 Smart Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy in 2016

Here's a fun little experiment to do with your friends. Next time you see one of them online, ask them if they know exactly how many different accounts they have for various products, services, subscriptions, etc. I guarantee they won't be able to answer accurately (for having so many!) This experiment proves its point when you then ask your friend whether they can remember every password for each account. They will either say no because they use so many different passwords, or even worse, they'll say yes because they use the same password for all their accounts.

Both circumstances are very unsafe and poor "privacy practice", since on the one hand your friend has no logical, efficient management of the many passwords they have -- or they have this one password that is essentially a ticking time-bomb to be discovered (easily) by a curious hacker.

The beauty of a password manager is that it solves both these problems in a simple and secure way. By using one, you can store all the different passwords you use for your accounts and have them all protected by using a "master" password, which you make extra-super-duper-crazy difficult.

As with anti-virus software providers, there are many password managers to choose from. I suggest using 1password purely because I personally use it and find it to be incredibly well designed and constantly updated regularly.

Using a VPN is pretty much a necessity in today's privacy-compromised online world.

A VPN is a really simple yet sophisticated way of encrypting every single moment of your online activity. This encryption essentially makes it impossible for any third party to monitor your online activity and connect it to your personal identity/location.

The secondary benefit of using a VPN is that it gives you a large amount of online freedom. This means that regardless of where you are in the world at any time, you can open your VPN and choose a location that you would like your device to "appear" from within.

VPNs are really straight forward to setup on any device you use that connects to the internet. It is a very light piece of software, which means it can travel with you to wherever you decide to locate yourself in the world.

As you can guess, there are many VPN service providers out there that offer differing levels of encryption (thus privacy levels) at various levels of pricing. To make the best decision for your personal budget I recommend checking out a reputable comparison site like Fried.com. Doing so will save you hours of personal research and reviewing of the hundreds of VPN providers available to you.